The Battle of New Orleans

Even in America, civil order is more fragile than we think.

The editors of The Wall Street Journal remind us that the veneer of civilization is not as thick in all people as we would like to believe. The anarchy we have seen in New Orleans in the wake of the disaster teaches us, once again, that the order we take for granted is the result of ethical restraint combined with the threat of physical force. Most people are governed by some amount of the former. That is why most people don't run a stop sign in the middle of the night even though there are no police around to observe them.

But there is a minority, and sometimes a sizable one at that, which has no such restraints. They are the ones we have seen on the news hauling flat screen televisions out of department stores even though they have no place to plug them in and no electricity with which to run them. These people are only stopped from doing such things the rest of the time by the threat of arrest and jail. And since that threat was absent for a time, we saw their true nature on display. Some have called this a return to the primitive. But in truth it would be more accurate to say that these people were never really civilized in the first place. Because civilization cannot be preserved unless most people carry the ethical restraints within them and abide by them even when they don't have to do so. For the rest, the prospect of a prison cell is what keeps them more honest than they otherwise would be.